Among present-day American leftists (who prefer calling themselves progressives), a curious characteristic is their sympathy for Islam. They deplore what they call Islamophobia, regarding it as a sin as bad as racism or sexism or homophobia or transphobia; and they are horrified that a man they consider to be an Islamophobe, Donald Trump, should be in the White House.

Why is this sympathy for Islamic “curious”? Because no religion could be more at odds with progressive ideas than Islam. For one thing, Islam believes in God, an all-powerful God who controls everything in the created world. Progressives, on the other hand, tend to be atheists or at least semi-atheists.

For another, Islam has always taught that women must be socially inferior to men; it is a strongly patriarchal religion, and progressives hate few things more than they hate patriarchy. Islam also puts a strong emphasis on chastity, condemning adultery and fornication and – especially – homosexuality. And it considers monstrous that progressive favorite, same-sex marriage.

Of course, many Muslims (Muslim men, that is, not Muslim women) have over the centuries violated these pro-chastity values, but the religion nonetheless affirms the values. By contrast, although they regard sexual prudence as a good thing (and sexual prudence often bears a resemblance to chastity), progressives laugh at the idea that chastity is a virtue.

Why, then, are progressives sympathetic to such an anti-progressive religion and its adherents? Ask this question of a progressive, and he or she will tell you, “Because we believe in freedom of religion and in diversity.”

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Being pro-Islam is an indirect way of being anti-Christianity. When Christianity is sufficiently destroyed, the progressive alliance with Islam can be dissolved, just as the USA-Soviet alliance was dissolved after Nazism had been destroyed; and then progressivism can turn to the task of destroying Islam – if Islam does not destroy progressivism first, which is the more likely outcome.

But Islam is hostile not just to Christianity but to Judaism as well. This is another of its great merits in the eyes of progressivism. For progressivism is strongly anti-Israel. And being anti-Israel (or anti-Zionist) is the most modern and up-to-date form of Jew-hatred; it is today’s fashionable form of anti-Semitism.

What’s more, being anti-Israel is an indirect way of being anti-American. Much of the Israel-hatred that is so common among European and American leftists (including, weirdly, leftists who are themselves Jews) is motivated by a hatred for America. Israel and the United States having been so closely connected from 1948 to the present, he who hates Israel hates America.

This is not to say that American progressives hate America pure and simple. No, they hate America as it has been up until now. They wish to do away with the old and bad America, and replace it with a “new and improved” America, a progressivized America.

By being a pro-Islam progressive, then, you win a trifecta. You get to strike three blows at once: one against Christianity, another against Israel, and a third against the “old and bad” America. For a progressive, what could be better?

There is a large and growing defection, worldwide, of Muslims to the Christian religion. This we know from many sources; I’ve been aware of the phenomenon for more than twenty years. It does not make the news because it is not “newsworthy.” That is to say, it does not fit with anyone’s agenda in the West, and is anyway a dangerous story to cover, for subjects and journalists alike. Oddly enough, it gets most play in Islamic media, where “we are losing the battle of conversions” has become almost an obsession. By “worldwide” I mean in Europe and the Americas, in Asia and in Africa, and also throughout the Dar al-Islam. It is of great historical significance, for it has been practically a truism that Muslims don’t convert.

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The future of Christianity is not European. We have perhaps forgotten that Christ did not rise in the West, but in the East; or for geographical punctilio, at the interchange of the three vast continents of the Old World. Arabs, as all Africans and Asians, are capable of noticing this.

Moreover, the future of Christianity, within “The West,” is also not European.

It will prove too “traditional” for that. For the appeal of a lukewarm, compromised, corrupted, “progressive” and “secularized” Christianity — to sincere Christian converts — is zero.

Afghans should not even have been part of the refugee tide, at least not in significant numbers. It was the Syrians who were expected. Afghanistan, a place of lingering and chronic conflict, is no longer on the official refugee roster—that’s reserved for acute political and military emergencies. Still, European authorities and the public were sympathetic, and could understand why Afghans would want to leave a country rife with suicide bombings and empty of opportunity. Also, Europeans held a baseline positive sentiment towards Afghanistan. Many baby-boomer Europeans had, in their hippie days of yore, traversed that country in the legendary VW buses, and retained fond memories of friendly, hospitable people. Later everyone had mourned the loss of the Bamiyan Buddhas and felt for the poor people suffering under Taliban rule. And after that, NATO had been part of the “coalition of the willing.” Europeans were predisposed to be positive towards Afghan refugees. But it quickly became obvious that something was wrong, very wrong, with these young Afghan men: they were committing sex crimes to a much greater extent than other refugees, even those from countries that were equally or more backward, just as Islamic and conservative, and arguably just as misogynist.

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And it’s not just the sex crimes, my friend notes. Those may agitate public sentiment the most, but the deliberate, insidious abuse of the welfare system is just as consequential. Afghan refugees, he says, have a particular proclivity to play the system: to lie about their age, to lie about their circumstances, to pretend to be younger, to be handicapped, to belong to an ethnic minority when even the tired eye of an Austrian judge can distinguish the delicate features of a Hazara from those of a Pashtun.

I see his point. In the course of my research, I encountered thirty-year-olds with family in Austria who were passing themselves off as “unaccompanied minors.” I met people misrepresenting an old traffic injury as proof that they had been tortured. I learned of an Afghan family that had emigrated to Hungary two decades ago. The children were born there and attended Hungarian schools. When the refugee crisis erupted, enticed by news of all the associated benefits, this family decided to take on a new identity and make their way to Sweden on the pretense of being brand-new refugees. Claiming to have lost their papers during their “flight,” they registered under new assumed names and reduced the ages of their children; the mother declared herself a widow. Now ensconced in comfortable free housing along with their hale, hearty and very much alive father—whom they pass off as an uncle—with a monthly welfare check, they are smug parasites leeching off the gullibility of Sweden’s taxpayers.

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But we are still left with a mystery. Welfare fraud is one thing: it makes a certain kind of sense, if you have no regard for rule of law or fairness and you are lazy. But why is this current cohort of Afghans making its mark as sexual predators . . . and inept, stupid ones at that? In search of an answer, perhaps we should take a closer look at the victims. We have eliminated improper attire and an unwittingly seductive manner, but might they have any other traits in common to shed light on why they became the targets of such madness? Reviewing them, one word comes to mind: fulfillment. A Turkish exchange student, happy to be advancing her education in industrial design at a good university in Vienna. A girl in a park, enjoying the sunshine. Two friends, taking their babies for a walk. A mother, enjoying a summer stroll with her two children. A contented old lady, out with her pet. Attractive, accomplished, happy, normal people . . . an unbearable sight, perhaps, to—and here I must agree with President Trump—losers. That is what he proposed we should call terrorists, and he is right. These young men, even minus a suicide vest, are losers, which has inspired them to become social terrorists.

The young Afghan attackers are saying, yes, that they have no impulse control, that their hormones are raging, and that they hate themselves and the world—but most especially, that they will not tolerate women who are happy, confident and feeling safe in public spaces. They are saying that they have no intention of respecting law, custom, public opinion, local values or common decency, all of which they hate so much that they are ready to put their own lives, their constructive futures and their freedom on the line for the satisfaction of inflicting damage.

One of the hallmarks of jihadists is their grotesque savagery against women. The classic Hollywood picture of a jihadist as a pure, pious young Muslim man is largely nonsense. The reality is far more brutish. The tales of sex slavery in ISIS-held Iraq and Syria should chill thinking people to the bone. During my own time in Iraq, al-Qaeda terrorists were known for systematically raping women as part of an effort to shame them into becoming suicide bombers. After brutal gang rapes, they were told that the only way they could “redeem” their allegedly lost honor was to strap a bomb on their broken bodies and blow themselves up at restaurants, checkpoints, and hospitals. It was pure evil.

Also striking was the nonchalance and fearlessness of the most hardened jihadists after their capture by Americans. By the end of my deployment, I could almost predict whether we’d snagged a committed jihadist by his attitude in detention. Al-Qaeda leaders would often laugh, act like they were on vacation, and sometimes attempt to engage their captors in casual conversation. I’ll never forget the arrogant confidence of an Oxford English-speaking leader of an al-Qaeda rape ring. They knew they were safe, and they gloried in their invulnerability.

It’s against this backdrop — savage treatment of women and contempt for Western justice — that I read with alarm a stunning report on “Europe’s Afghan crime wave.” The piece is notable not just for its content, but for its author. Cheryl Benard has worked sympathetically with refugees and was a subject-matter expert at the RAND corporation. In other words, this piece isn’t from the anti-Muslim fever swamps but from the heart of the elite national-security establishment. Her thesis is simple: European nations are grappling with a wave of vicious immigrant attacks against women, and the attackers are coming disproportionately from Afghanistan.

The stories are horrifying, sometimes involving attacks in broad daylight and in public spaces like parks, trains, and train stations.

Islam is a religion, not a race, and, what is more, it is thoroughly multiracial, with all races represented in its ranks. To oppose ISIS and seek appropriate measures to prevent the spread of its influence and power is no more racist or ‘Islamophobic’ than opposition to the terrorism of the IRA in the 1970s was racist or ‘celtophobic.’ Opposition to barbarism and the terrorism it practices is a mark of civilization, not racism.

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Europeans have embraced the culture of death, contracepting themselves out of existence. Europe is not suffering from a population explosion but a population implosion. With a shrinking and aging population, unwilling to reproduce itself, immigration becomes a necessity. One cannot have a sustainable economy, still less a continually expanding economy, if the number of producers and consumers is shrinking. A culture which seeks self-gratification instead of the self-sacrifice needed to raise children is doomed to self-destruction. It has no future. It has no future for the plain and simple reason that it has no children. In this sense, it can truly be said that the future belongs to those who forsake selfishness for the selflessness of parenthood. The meek really do inherit the earth!

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As one who subscribes to–nay, as one who submits to—the Permanent Things, I would say that the “West” is not synonymous with the Permanent Things, nor do the Permanent Things depend on the survival of the “West” for their permanence. On the contrary, the “West” is dying because it has turned its back on the Permanent Things.

The Permanent Things are grounded in a reverence for God and for the Church that He established, and also in a reverence for the traditional family which is the bedrock of all healthy culture and the seed with which it plants itself into the future. When the love for God is gone and the family has been abandoned, there is no future. The secular fundamentalist “West” is decaying because it is decadent, and it is dying because it has embraced the culture of death.

What will be left when the secularist “West” is dead will be the Permanent Things. Christianity is alive and well, and thriving and growing, in Africa, Asia, China–and yes, even in resurrected embryonic form in Europe and other parts of the “West.” Europe and the “West” might be committing collective suicide, but Christendom is always new, as it is always old, because it is the Permanent Thing.

“If Islam is such a hair-trigger religion that the slightest offense might radicalize adherents, there is something radically wrong with the religion itself.”

Anyone with a thorough understanding of Islamic culture and religion could have predicted that, even without the 2015-16 flood of Muslim migrants, the steady flow of Muslim immigrants over the years would create a combustible situation. The amazing thing is that the consequences of this massive migration were never discussed – except in glowing terms. Just about the only thing allowed to be said about the migrants was that they would solve labor shortages, refill welfare coffers, and bring cultural enrichment to Europe.

That was the official line. Anyone who deviated from it could expect censure, possible job loss, or even a criminal trial. Say something negative about Muslim immigration on your Facebook page and you would be visited by police. Say it in public and you would receive a court summons. It didn’t matter if you were a famous writer (Oriana Fallaci), the President of the Danish Free Press Society (Lars Hedegaard), or a popular member of the Dutch Parliament (Geert Wilders). If you couldn’t say something nice about Islam, then you shouldn’t say anything at all.

Practically no one spoke up about no-go-zones, sharia courts, polygamy, and forced marriages, refusal to integrate, crime waves, and the rape epidemic. Now that many are finally beginning to speak out, it may be too late to avoid capitulation (Sweden’s likely fate) or bloody conflict (more likely in France).

The very argument that criticism of Islam will drive moderates into the radical camp suggests that criticism is needed. If Islam is such a hair-trigger religion that the slightest offense might radicalize adherents, there is something radically wrong with the religion itself. We don’t worry that criticizing Catholicism is going to produce angry Catholic mobs rampaging through the streets. We don’t fear that one wrong word is going to cause a young Southern Baptist to strap on a suicide belt.

Islam invites criticism. Given its bloody past and present, it would be highly irresponsible not to subject it to a searching analysis and critique. Such a critique would not aim at alienating Muslims (although some will inevitably be alienated), but at alerting likely victims of jihad.

One of the basics that non-Muslims need to know is that Islam divides the world in two – the House of Islam, and the House of War (all non-Islamic societies). And every Muslim is expected to do his part to make the House of War submit to the House of Islam. Europeans are now experiencing a “don’t-know-what-hit-me” sense of bewilderment because they never learned this basic fact about Islam.

In Israel, Arab communities live in peace with their neighbors, they vote, and Arabs hold high public office. In the West Bank (the historic regions of Judea and Samaria), Jewish communities have to live under constant, armed protection or they face slaughter. Indeed, in the event that a true Palestinian state ever exists, one of its first orders of business will be a spate of ethnic cleansing. Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas told Egyptian journalists, “In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli – civilian or soldier – on our lands.” In other words, remove the Jews, or we’ll remove them for you.

Make no mistake, when Palestinians imagine their own state, they don’t imagine a multi-ethnic, multi-faith democracy. Instead, they imagine yet another intolerant, Muslim-dominated ethnic enclave. That’s their vision of “peace.” That’s their vision of statehood. No Jews in Judea. I’m not clear which American “value” dictates that we lift one single finger to facilitate such mindless hate.

China’s “utterly disgraceful” human rights record is not just bad, it’s getting worse every year, a new Congressional report has warned.

“The Chinese government’s human rights record is utterly disgraceful, continuing a downward trend over the past three years,” Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), chair of the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Committee on China, which published the report, stated on Thursday.

“The Chinese government took extraordinary and unprecedented steps last year to decimate the ranks of human rights lawyers, crush independent civil society and religious groups, and expanded controls over the Internet and the press.”

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“China – now ranking as the world’s second largest economy – has benefited greatly from the international rules-based system in driving its economic transformation and growth,” the report’s executive summary stated.

However, it added, the ruling Chinese Communist Party has not improved its human rights record and respected the rule of law as it has been expected to by the international community. From suppression of religious freedom to detaining dissidents and human rights activists to forced population control, the Chinese state “has run roughshod over human rights” Rep. Smith stated, and it must be held accountable.

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The Chinese government also cracked down on the rise of non-sanctioned religious groups in 2015, the report said, and on Friday it exerted greater control over the practice of religion through its new regulations of religion.

“In both law and practice, the Chinese government continued to violate the rights of its citizens to religious freedom,” the report said, noting the state has “broad discretion over religious practice, internal affairs, and interpretations of faith, which is often exercised based on Party and government policy interests.”

Party officials warned at April’s National Conference on Religious Work that religious groups must be loyal to the state and signaled that they will exercise tighter control on religion in the future to guard against the supposed infiltration of foreign powers through religion.

When the party released its religious regulations on Friday, Rep. Smith called it “stunning, but not surprising.”

“Religious practice is exploding in China, particularly among Christians, and the religious life of Tibetan Buddhist, Uyghur Muslim, and Falun Gong practitioners persist despite decades of the worst abuses,” he said.

However, religious groups must register with the government, and in China there is a state Catholic Church and an “underground” Catholic Church. Local and national officials have harassed or persecuted Catholics who are not part of the state Catholic Church, destroying churches and detaining or harassing bishops and priests.

In Western news-making and opinion-forming circles, there’s a palpable reluctance to talk about the most noteworthy thing about modern Islamist violence: its barbarism, its graphic lack of moral restraint. This goes beyond the BBC’s yellow reluctance to deploy the T-word – terrorism – in relation to the bloody assault on the Westgate shopping mall in Kenya at the weekend. Across the commentating board, people are sheepish about pointing out the historically unique lunacy of Islamist violence and its utter detachment from any recognisable moral universe or human values. We have to talk about this barbarism; we have to appreciate how new and unusual it is, how different it is even from the terrorism of the 1970s or of the early twentieth century. We owe it to the victims of these assaults, and to the principle of honest and frank political debate, to face up to the unhinged, morally unanchored nature of Islamist violence in the 21st century.

Or consider the attack on Westgate in Kenya, where both the old and the young, black and white, male and female were targeted. With no clear stated aims from the people who carried the attack out, and no logic to their strange and brutal behaviour, Westgate had more in common with those mass mall and school shootings that are occasionally carried out by disturbed people in the West than it did with the political violence of yesteryear. And yet still observers avoid using the T-word or the M-word (murder) to describe what happened there, and instead attach all sorts of made-up, see-through political theories to this rampage, giving what was effectively a terror tantrum executed by morally unrestrained Islamists the respectability of being a political protest of some breed.

Time and again, one reads about Islamist attacks that seem to defy not only the most basic of humanity’s moral strictures but also political and even guerrilla logic. Consider the hundreds of suicide attacks that have taken place in Iraq in recent years, a great number of them against ordinary Iraqis, often children. Western apologists for this wave of weird violence, which they call “resistance”, claim it is about fighting against the Western forces which were occupying Iraq in the wake of the 2003 invasion. If so, it’s the first “resistance” in history whose prime targets have been civilians rather than security forces, and which has failed to put forward any kind of political programme that its violence is allegedly designed to achieve. Even experts in counterinsurgency have found themselves perplexed by the numerous nameless suicide assaults on massive numbers of civilians in post-war Iraq, and the fact that these violent actors, unlike the vast majority of violent political actors in history, have “developed no alternative government or political wing and displayed no intention of amassing territory to govern”. One Iraqi attack has stuck in my mind for seven years. In 2006 a female suicide bomber blew herself up among families – including many mothers and their offspring – who were queuing up for kerosene. Can you imagine what happened? A terrible glimpse was offered by this line in a Washington Post report on 24 September 2006: “Two pre-teen girls embraced each other as they burned to death.”

What we have today, uniquely in human history, is a terrorism that seems myopically focused on killing as many people as possible and which has no clear political goals and no stated territorial aims. The question is, why? It is not moral masturbation to ask this question or to point out the peculiarity and perversity of modern Islamist violence. My penny’s worth is that this terrorism speaks to a profound crisis of politics and of morality.

It’s Sunny at the White House! But not in Egypt, if you are a Christian or a Franciscan nun. All over the country, Christian churches are being burned, Christians murdered, and nuns paraded in the streets as “prisoners of war.”

The “war”: this can only mean a war of Islam vs. Christianity, right? What other “war” could they be prisoners of? (Their words, not mine.) The Muslim Brotherhood and their thug adherents are conducting a war of genocide against Christians, trying to erase the Copts – one of the oldest Christian groups in the world – from the land.

Once upon a time in America, the American president would have stood before the world, over and over again, and provided a moral counterweight to this evil. The great figures of the 20th Century became great by denouncing evil and condemning genocidal and religious persecution: Reagan, Churchill, Wojtyla.

But Obama is no Wojtyla. He has remained nearly silent on the Muslim Brotherhood’s bloody war on Egypt’s Christians. The martyrs pile up; he plays golf.

The Muslim Brotherhood have paraded three nuns through the streets like prisoners of war and sexually assaulted their lay colleagues after attacking and burning a Franciscan school. One of the Franciscan sisters said:

“We are nuns. We rely on God and the angels to protect us. At the end, they paraded us like prisoners of war and hurled abuse at us as they led us from one alley to another without telling us where they were taking us.”

Few people realize that we are today living through the largest persecution of Christians in history, worse even than the famous attacks under ancient Roman emperors like Diocletian and Nero. Estimates of the numbers of Christians under assault range from 100-200 million. According to one estimate, a Christian is martyred every five minutes. And most of this persecution is taking place at the hands of Muslims. Of the top fifty countries persecuting Christians, forty-two have either a Muslim majority or have sizeable Muslim populations.

Fourteen days after Ambassador Chris Stevens was murdered by Islamists, President Barack Obama stood up in front of the United Nations and declared that the “message” of a movie virtually no one will ever see “must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity,” that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” and that we all should “condemn incitement against Sufi Muslims, and Shiite pilgrims.”
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So many things wrong in so few words. Why this video, and not Theo Van Gogh’s Submission, or Lars Vilks’ animation of Mohammed wanting to go to a gay bar, the “Super Best Friends” episode of South Park, or Funny or Die’s “How to Pick a Pocket”? Is it the degree of the insult, the craptasticness of the production values, the size of the release, or the vociferousness of the outrage expressed?